121 Responses to this entry

Puzzle Privateer (@PuzzlePrivateer) Says:

ok my last attempt to post this comment:

Re: Bryce

Ever read about the history of Objectivism? Rand purged people who weren’t intellectually pure too. It really did degenerate into a cult and the current bullshit over “omg Bryce talked to a tranny” is verging on that territory. If you really want NRx to go anywhere, then don’t model it on *any* libertarian thought-cult.

So while I’ve enjoyed reading More Right, a certain someone need to be taken down a peg or five and this kind of “purge” behavior need to be stepped on now.

Still arguing over the method of execution. Hanging is too clean. He must be disgraced and made an example of. Maybe burning him on the stake? That’s what we do with heretics. Or just the plain old tying his feet to a horse and drawing him through the countryside? So many choices…

The result of following the progression of this insanity is the loss of more and more mental capacity. (I think I’m going mad, and fast) Anissimov maybe wants to drive us all insane, and soon enough it might actually happen. Apparently people who talk to leftists without explicitly trying to convert them or kill them (preferably) are leftists themselves. ALWAYS. I am not sure what this logical fallacy is called, but I am pretty sure it is one. (actually I am not sure there is even any logic in this one)
Nick B Steves tried to talk some sense to the kid, with some really elaborate post on why that is bullshit, but he either ignored it or missed the point.

The parody is that the social conservatism is still there, intact. And the end of NRx from the start is the truth, not some arbitrary set of values, simply because they are “conservative”. Usually it is the case that those conservative values are indeed the truth, but Anissimov is having a means/ends confusion problem here.

If Anissimov is serious about this, he is overly paranoid, borderline hysterical. Nearly insane.
If he is not, he is doing it only for the status games and signalling who is the bigger monkey. Which makes him a narcissist. Also insane.
My diagnosis: Anissimov has gone insane.

I’ve noticed a reluctance to identify with NRx — even in people other than myself. It may be that Anissimov ends up bringing about the un-definition of the term, allowing its ideological load to disperse throughout the ether detached from the chimp-politics of thede-names…

What Anissimov misses — understandably so, since language just isn’t set up to do this — is that the ‘neoreactionary’ thing is not a natural class: the parts all fit together (one point of opposition to democracy is that actually-existing democracy is fundamentally incompatible with ‘social conservatism’), but one can oppose democracy without adopting every single viewpoint Anissimov includes under ‘social conservatism’, as Tunney has done.

In fact, this is a good thing. If members of the progressive coalition defect from it and adopt neocameralism instead… well, the third-world anti-imperialists didn’t exactly go around and tell Americans not to support them because anti-imperialism was incompatible with being an American. If they defect, aren’t they doing our work for us?

Hell, it might be useful to play up the anti-imperialism angle. If it was bad for Britain to rule America and it was bad for France to rule Algeria, doesn’t that mean it’s bad for Boston to rule Texas? (And then you can pattern-match progs’ arguments that Boston is superior to DC to the colonialist arguments that the savages needed to be raised up to the level of the objectively more advanced British/French.)

Bryce talked to the infamous Justine Tunney person.
Anissimov thinks she/he is contagious or something, plus some danger to NRx, or something, idk. Suspect Tunney is an entryist trying to infiltrate and ruin neoreaction. He thinks all who talk to Tunney are leftists.
Bryce talks to Tunney, therefore he is a leftist and must either repent his sins or be purged.

Excellent reference — the similarities are truly uncanny. (The ‘sanction’ rule is of course utterly preposterous.)

blue_traveler Reply:May 30th, 2014 at 1:27 pm

I actually think that Anissimov’s perspective makes sense, if you read Conquest’s Second to say “fight every sign of leftward drift to prevent leftward drift,” but I don’t think that interpretation has much utility. I think it’s better read as “pick your fights carefully && design institutions with their tendency to drift in mind.” If conversation is drift from MA’s perspective, then drift has already begun, and he ought to identify that it’s too late for the institution and scrap it. Maybe he’ll have better luck next time. The fact that he’s met with such resistance from the rest of the salon is strong evidence that his goals are different.

Conquest‘s Law does not apply because NRx is a philosophy, not an institution. If subsidiary institutions want such formal shunning procedures, fine. (The Include Me Out Club is unlikely to be affected — it isn’t going to sacrifice access to cognitive stimulation under any conditions.)

He gets bonus points in my book for taking Conquests Law seriously. Some of the arguments against his position, those that say we have developed a magical vaccine for leftist infection with our flimsy ideology, are basically retarded. It is disappointing to see non-retarded people like the twitter Duck voicing them.

But hey when people chimp out, intelligence goes out the window. Try Fnording some of the articles flying out of reactionsphere on this.

Trannygate has taken about 50% of the attention of the reactosphere. More on twitter, less in the blogosphere proper. Of the material written in relation to this 95% is crap, pure festering crap, I can think of maybe 3 pieces that are exceptions. From my perspective the signal of reaction has gone from 10% signal to 5%. My experience trying to keep pace up with the community in the past 10 days has been one of revulsion and cringing. And every single reactionary person I try to skype or email on interesting questions insists on talking about it.

Jim was the only person gracious enough to talk to me about Pu238, late Bronze Age collapse and reinstating slavery.

@Admin: Leftism drives out Rightism in online communities just as surely as institutions. I can give you dozens of examples. Dear lord we live in a society where companies are routinely trying to get rid of paying customers that are insufficiently leftist.

I am also pissed off because I was working on delicious insight plastered crimethink with regards to sexual policy, politics and that put transexuals into an interesting perspective. A few might even remind about 4 months ago a few tweets on the subject.

It is now impossible for me to publish something like that without it being seen as feces flinging for my chimp group. :/

@Admin: I’m not going to publicly comment either Michael’s or Nyan’s posts on the subject, because I refuse to participate in the chimp orgy.

admin Reply:June 1st, 2014 at 10:28 am

@ Konkvistador — “Online communities”? More tedious tragedies of the commons. Privatize them and the problem goes away. No one coments on my blog unless I let them (or on More Right at all). Twitter feeds are privately selected. Blogrolls similarly. Where is this “community”? Neocameralism, as usual, is the answer.

Which is why the advent of Facebook and the blog have heralded the end of holier than thou leftist spirals eating megahominids. Don’t be silly.

Theories should not override strong empirical observations. Internet as a medium for social interaction and the ability to leave such communities and have owners, even owners with financial incentives, take care of them does not stop leftist drift.

“Where is this “community”?”

You may not like this, but social networks of hominids themselves are not privatized, despite the means of following them being so. Don’t let your distaste for social animals blind you to the fact the human minds you interact with being such creatures.

those that say we have developed a magical vaccine for leftist infection with our flimsy ideology

Normally I would agree but most of core DE were zombies and aren’t anymore. It’s not a vaccine, it’s inoculation by the real thing. We had rabies but recovered. I don’t know about you, but I did it to myself; if I somehow got infected again I would cure myself again.

The problem is with those who were never really NRx in the first place; who liked the applause lights but didn’t want to trouble themselves to actually update their aliefs.

You want a label, fine, whatevs. But you’ll inevitably attract these hangers-on, and the internet being what it is, they will outnumber you and thus pressure the label to drift. Hence my suggestion to slough off labels regularly. Hell, why do you think Moldbug could never settle on a name for his ideology?

My point isn’t really to slough off labels. My point is if you really wanted to solve the problem, it is eminently solvable.

I am also pissed off because I was working on delicious insight plastered crimethink with regards to sexual policy, politics and that put transexuals into an interesting perspective. A few might even remind about 4 months ago a few tweets on the subject.

You know where to publish that. And I have some cosmetic creams to grow your skin thicker if you need them.

This Anissimov thing is weaponized boredom, but there may be one interesting point to be made about group purity and achieving very difficult goals (to the extent NRX hasn’t given up on accomplishing anything, the things it would like to accomplish are all extremely difficult).

The leftist tactic historically is to assume that if the goal isn’t achieved, its because the personnel weren’t worthy of it and need to be purged. This is why its so easy to make fun of the Stalinist elements in every leftist group ever–they just can’t help themselves with purges and hysterical witch hunts. But even other non-traditional leftists like the Nazis did the same thing. The Nazi plan was “purge the Jews, ???, profit.” And as the war went worse, they amped up the jew purge.

The correct, rightwing tactic, on the other hand, is to focus on the difficult goal and let that do your purging for you. Ironically, for all the pseudo-religious character of leftism, this is how actually successful religions seem to work. The Mormons excommunicate very few people. The Amish rumspringa is a giant invitation to not let the door hit you on the way out if you aren’t comfortable with the Amish thing.

So if Anissimov is worried about entryism, he should stop playing the Grand Inquisitor and take a few more cues from Jim.

The correct, rightwing tactic, on the other hand, is to focus on the difficult goal and let that do your purging for you.

I have to agree with this. Surface traits can be forced, and enforcing surface conformity will just send the deceptive to the top. It’s better to let each contribute as he can, so long as he contributes toward the goal/ideal and not some hypothetical or tangential goal.

Tunney is intelligent and inquisitive. She contributes quite a bit to discussion and publicizing the neoreaction/dark enlightenment/new right/traditionalist (NDNT) sector. Let her play, let libertarians come by, be open to everyone but the instant they deviate from goals, make it clear that this is “something else.”

I’m not sure which supposed agent provocateur you’re talking about. I have begged to see the casefile and none has been provided to me. The worst I have seen is an intemperate snide remark or two from Bryce to Mike. I now suspect that no convincing case can be made for any sort of provocation. If being dickish once or twice is a hangable offense, then we’re all dead men.

It’s still unclear to me how to articulate this schism most productively. I’m entirely confident it isn’t going to simply go away.

From my perspective, NRx is important as a development in political philosophy. To conceive it as primarily a political and social movement strikes me as profoundly mistaken, and a cognitive vice that will inevitably reduce it so something like the ENR. Not only will this be utterly repulsive to the people who matter most (intellectual elites tending to realism, and especially techno-commercial pioneers), it will shut down all serious strategic avenues of advance — repeating the way the extreme right has always failed before. Mike A’s project is not going anywhere, in my opinion. The horizons Moldbug opened are being shut down, almost systematically. Of course, in the end, the chimera of today’s ‘NRx’ will split apart. Those MA has on his purge list are exactly the people I expect to be most capable of actually producing breakthroughs that matter. They are simply vastly more thoughtful than the reactionary moralist chorus.

My characterization of NRx is pretty much dead-center of the purge target zone: Post-Libertarian Poly-Secessionism of the Extreme Right. It should engage in vigorous intellectual interchange with anything and anybody that can sharpen its thoughts. Any group that would have excluded Alan Turing, for instance, on grounds of social purity (or any other) is intrinsically retarded. That one Turing is worth many million social conservative ditto heads is not even seriously in question from my PoV. It’s not impossible that one could work with groups that proceed from different assumptions, but it would definitely be in the mode of tactical alliance than any kind of deeper communal solidarity.

When the definitive split comes, if I end up confederated with the people MA has anathematized, I think I’ll be doing pretty well. The constituency would be based on post-libertarians, working their way ever further right, in a direction they are confident leads away from fascism, rather than towards it. This is what NRx is about. There are already innumerable ‘rightist’ options aligned with alternative vectors — none of them effective or appealing ones.

Moldbug didn’t invent the term Neoreactionary, so I’m not sure how your argument here really works. De Maistre is obviously a reactionary — no ‘neo-‘ in sight. Metternich, I’m not sure — why do you assume he’d be a problem?

The main reason to abandon the ‘NRx’ semiotic territory is conflict reduction. One thing MA and I fully agree upon: that isn’t any kind of priority.

The only the name neoreactionary exists is because Moldbug called himself and his followers “reactionary”, mostly for shock value and because he did talk a lot of Henry VII.

Still most of his followers did understand that reactionary means de Maistre and weren’t quite willing to use that word for themselves. Then Arnold Kling came up with “neoreactionary” and the thing stuck.

A prefix doesn’t annul the lexeme it precedes. It complements it. Yes neoconservatives turned out to not be very conservative but the whole point of calling themselves so was to fool conservatives into voting for them.

Unless you are trying to fool fans of de Maistre and Charles Maurras into following you, I really see no point in you clinging to the name. Unless you want more young papists to turn to the dark side.

And I do understand that you want to force the issue with Anis so it is made clear loudly that you guys have nothing in common, and fascists should go that way.

But you can achieve that just as easily by letting him be the weird reactionary king wannabe, while you call yourself Confucian HBD Accelerationist. Guaranteed no fascists will ever come here again.

Mike Reply:May 31st, 2014 at 7:23 am

“Moldbug didn’t invent the term Neoreactionary, so I’m not sure how your argument here really works.”

The earliest mention of “neo-reactionary” or “neoreactionary” I can find is the former, in OL3, in May 2008:

I still don’t get why the official idea of a short-lived, relatively benign Italian regime made stupid mostly by the fact that it was led by a hopelessly incompetent journalist has become synonymous with Bad Things. But, you know, we all talk progressive.

In followup to my comment on Katy Perry’s aristocratic ethos in ‘Stereotypes’, I should offer a caveat here. Whilst movements and groups of malcontents will never amount to more than uppity peasants, the Satanic force of the world, cast down from her light as into the depths of hell, individuals may traverse this barren wilderness on their path to re-entry into greater revelation of the sublimity she represents.

So, the Red Pill really functions something like an entrance test to the silver-blooded class of spirit (see Plato). The set of myths operating at this level operate to filter the aspirant intellect out from the blind but Godly mass of the body of bronze, at which point they will either fall back down into some new gross affiliation or identity, or, alternately, continue transcending identity on their path to vision.

And so each brain find its level, and its myth; and the gold is sifted out from the bronze; and then, as it rises, from the silver. The Matrix is a genre-defining here, operating as it does at the level of gross polarity, and being unplugged. This is the threshold between bronze and silver, whose myth it retells.

What we have with Mike A is a manifest pleb, shouting loudly of his affiliation with aristocracy. What we have with dear admin’s version of NRx, in so far as it transcends Moldbug’s limits, is a character or kind of thought, vision, cognition that is fluid in its use of identity. There is more Gold in its blood. The schism will not go away because NRx is an attempt to capture the process of stratification in a movement, and filtering stratification is thus… in its blood.

As admin says, the correct movement of such an uprising of intelligence is right. Eventually, in the case of genetically blessed individuals, it will move so far right that it arrives at reality. Reality being several light years to the right of Evola, who it considers an upstart.

At that point the individual leaves all movements, feels a mild sense of shame at their former silliness, and partakes the beauty they were formerly too blind to assent to. That beauty being our society, in its presently manifest divinity.

And they probably become a leftist.

Realists don’t need idelogues, except as employees; for their part, they recognise one another. This, not political discourse, is where strategy occurs. You will find your best entrepeneurs here.

Ms. Perry’s ‘Wide Awake’ being the prime source material for this crude exegesis. Cohesion, separation, filtration, then re-integration into the Cathedral, which is in fact aptly named as the true house of God.

It seems to me we all have this kind of insanity within us. After all, it’s not always insane. The question is whether you deny it, keep it on a leash, or let it run loose.

I think it would be best to use the leash of irony. Let it out, in a limited way, as a self-refuting game. Sadly, it seems most don’t understand it’s possible to admit feeling something without endorsing it.

Sadly, it seems Freud (or someone equally disreputable) was right about suppressed feelings. They don’t go away, they get expressed covertly. Subconsciously. It’s better to let them out in a controlled environment.

I might try it anyway. Perhaps Dark Locke is lonely and wants a buddy.

Telling that the next post down is Anissimov, titled “Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum.”

I see little use in continuing to engage with Anissimov. He exhibits all the characteristics of a dramatic tumblr leftist, but with regard to rightward authoritarian politics. He will, I promise you, but utterly repulsive to newcomers—or at least the newcomers you want sticking around. Why bother to continue with the dialectics? What happened to exit over voice? The best parts of NRx have always been lefty refuse anyways; I say we ditch the NRx brand name, come up with something more politically disinterested, and wait for the smart people to get fed up with Little Lord Anissimov.

Arguing for an ordered movement is one thing; arguing that the arguer should be the leader of an ordered movement is another. There’s a case to be made for the first, but I won’t take anyone who makes the case seriously unless they exempt themselves from consideration for the position.

Not that there has to be only one ordered movement, of course. Progressives work by having multiple ordered movements with minimal formal connections [but probably plenty of informal ones]; I see no reason why that architecture wouldn’t work. It’s less fragile than having only one, at least, and less vulnerable to memetic immunity.

reactionary itself is just a catchall like ‘capitalist’ – there have been a number of very clear reactionaries, but they disagree on many things, including on what makes one ‘genuinely reactionary’ (a fool’s errand in the end.)

In my view, reaction is mainly a metapolitical maturation process in the soul of a man. If reaction is not universalist, then neither are its products all of a recognizably identical mold. The reason why you don’t squabble about who is ‘really a reactionary’ unless you’re a dunderhead is because of the following:

1. Realistically, the badge of reactionary carries with it no real clout
2. Reaction is disadvantaged in extremis, therefore motivations to ‘entryism’, which generally involve shifting the direction of a powerful force by concealing one’s motivations within a shifting mass of opinion don’t compute.
3. You can use all of the help you can get
4. From a trad Christian perspective, merely being deranged is not enough to get you shunned; you need to be an active schismatic or heretic FOR your perversion

Given all of this and the linguistic tradition behind the Enlightenment, I would expect the two successful crosses between Reaction and Enlightenment that are not dead on arrival to be French and English, which correspond interestingly enough to Archaeofuturism and Neoreaction.

I keep saying the solution is to eat. It is not what goes into a man that makes him impure, but what comes out of him.

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the Idahoan inquisition.

Anyway, to me this issue seems to be mostly a time-preference thing. I believe that Moldbug was correct in blaming the failure of the modern right on the fact that rather than toughing it out and developing a rigorous and intellectually satisfying system that could effectively combat whiggery, they instead decided to jump straight into the political arena by simply catering to less intellectually inclined people, which has doomed them to failure, since it left cultural drift in the hands of progressive brahmin.

While the antipathy Anissimov has for libertines isn’t entirely alien to me, making the same mistake as the one conservatives made doesn’t seem particularly appealing either. This whole ordeal just makes me recall the criticism Hoppe levied on Buchanan.

Social conservatism and the welfare state are incompatible. Minarchy and democratic and/or large (geographically speaking) states are incompatible. When culture and economics end up in a struggle over the soul of a people, then in the long run economics will win. If you want to change society, then focus on economics, doing it the other way around is Sisyphean.

If Tunney wants to become an advocate for a system that will in all likelihood be more hostile towards him/her than the current system is, why should one get upset over this?

I said Twitter would end in tears. I’m incredibly close to deleting my account. The sense of community is nice, but the longer we remain centered there, the less time there will still be a community at all.

Writing/commenting when this thing was blog-focused created natural and useful barriers to entry. At least half of the regular NRx tweeters consistently demonstrate a complete lack of engagement with core text. A chunk of them want to define NRx in ways that clearly contradict basis premises. There are at least a few spotlight seekers who care little for the ideology itself. They all should LURK MOAR. Two years ago, they did. Now? Mindless inundation of nonsense, monkey wars, and drunk posting.

If you add a time-preference that extends to at least the next generation to your authoritarian capitalism (unlike Singapore, where the smart people don’t have kids and neither does anybody else), you end up with something that looks a lot like a socially conservative element. Land will admit this at times, but he doesn’t like it so he forgets it. Of course Anissimov’s comic purge isn’t the social conservative element you’d end up with, and even if it were, you don’t create a functioning state by aping the things that a functioning state would do once it was in existence.

I am midwifing a notion that once you start with any one element of the triad and an understanding of reality, you end up with the other two if your time horizon extends our for several generations (i.e., if you want your element of the triad to continue indefinitely). Start with capitalism. You need social conservatism for births, social stability, and for inculcating the bourgeois virtues and for giving people a rough and ready social net that isn’t reliant on the state. You probably need some kind of nationalist/ethnic/militaristic component to have the necessary social cohesion to win or deter wars. Start with social conservatism. You need capitalism because state welfare corrodes family formation, whereas free markets encourage it as a social welfare net, and because you need the jobs and wealth to provide for the kids and give them the ability to form families of their own. You need the nationalistic/militaristic component for the same reason as the capitalists need it. Whereas if you want a strong military-minded ethnicity, you need social conservatism for the quality babies and capitalism for the sinews of war. The nationalist/ethnic element could conceivably be replaced to some degree by an authoritarian rule especially if it had some alternate basis of legitimacy (religious? monarchical?). You probably would want an authoritarian anyway because each element of the triad could also mess the other two up as we are all too familiar with and it seems unlikely that a democracy is going to have to the judgment and decisiveness to manage the balance over the long term.

That’s what you get if your goal is a competitive, successful society for the indefinite term. If you want to get rid of people and replace them with the AI singularity like Land does, then if you think its coming in the short term there’s no real need for any political effort or thought at all, because its coming anyway. But if you think there’s a real probability that it will take awhile, more than 50 years, and if you think capitalist tech development is the most assured path to get there, you’re back to pushing for all three elements of the triad again.

As far as I can tell, Anissimov just didn’t want Tunney in NRx. The claims that he’s telling people who they can be friends with appear to be conflating different assertions he has made on different topics. Since Tunney espouses neoreactionary views and there’s no “members list” for neoreaction, people will obviously assume that Tunney is part of NRx if people engage him favourably on Twitter (since that’s the only sign that anyone is in or out of NRx). I don’t tweet and I don’t engage with this community much, so it’s really not my place to say, but his concern appears to be well-founded to me.

The triad you propose is interesting, but I’m not sure you get free market capitalism from social conservatism. Perhaps you get anti-welfarism, but free market capitalism wasn’t formed in opposition to welfarism, it was formed in opposition to the economics of the traditional state, so there’s some leeway left there. The way I’d approach the same issue is to say that opposition to all three things has its roots in the same misconceptions – i.e., representational democracy, libertinism and wealth equality all have the same intellectual roots. Once you disentangle those misconceptions you’re left with “socially conservative authoritarian anti-welfarism” AKA civilisation.

“free market capitalism wasn’t formed in opposition to welfarism, it was formed in opposition to the economics of the traditional state”

Opposition to the economics of the traditional state? Where did you get that idea?

Porphy's Attorney Reply:May 30th, 2014 at 11:08 pm

@scientism I think he gets that from Smith’s argument against merchantilism. Which is then taken as the economics of the traditional state. (Of course Keynsianism, the economics practiced by the Modern Structure, with its focus on agregate flows bears no small resemblance to merchantilism).

Of course, whether that acurately reflects the economics as practiced in pre-merchantilist (traditional) Europe might be another matter and one worthy of closer scrutiny – by which I mean going past sources that feed us self-serving narratives of what “pre-capitalist societies” were like. For which the first step is a recognition that “complexity” wasn’t invented in 1900. Or even 1800.

scientism Reply:May 30th, 2014 at 11:21 pm

Yes, the founders of economics argued for free markets against mercantilism and not against redistribution. What I mean, though, is that there are many more reasons to intervene in markets besides social welfare, so free market capitalism doesn’t necessarily follow from social conservatism.

seems to me that Christian nationalism expressed itself as an ‘ethnos’ or people, anyway. Our imperial hymn says, “O Lord, save thy people…” ethne and politimas come together there. That means that ‘white’ nationalism or ‘French’ nationalism isn’t the only option for the ethnic element, just as Orthodox Christianity needn’t be the only possibility for the traditional element.

Christian nationalism is problematic because since the fall of Rome it hasn’t corresponded to a nation very well and since its too subject to schism. Other kinds of nationalism can be split up to, but with more difficulty where the basis isn’t explicitly doctrinal.;

But consider this. Social conservatism = population growth (keeping up with rival states probably also requires population growth). Population growth requires economic growth, or else you get destabilizing Malthusianism. Economic growth means capitalism.

Or consider the fate of a social conservative society that is surrounded by much more prosperous societies. It will be weak, because it is poor. It will also be ideologically weak, because ‘the fleshpots of Egypt’ are inherently destabilizing propaganda.

I don’t think we should use examples of Muslims or Asians if we’re talking about whites, and not even all whites apply since this seems to be mainly Anglo-Saxon/British Isles. The history of the people is one where the most fundamentalist religious types ended up as the drivers of capitalism. First the Puritans to an extent, but then the Scottish really brought it home, from Adam Smith to Carnegie. The Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, the fire and brimstone Calvinists, were the engine of capitalism.

I’d say the transsexualism issue is more complex than this discussion is allowing for. How does it rank in the hierarchy of social conservative abominations? It’s an attempt to re-order a disordered nature, isn’t it? Even if it’s a solution conservatives don’t naturally warm to, it’s not being driven by an attempt to perversely deepen chaos.

Nature can be screwed up. There are hermaphrodites. I’m assuming the right is unwilling to embrace crude social constructivist accounts of same-sex preference. It’s not as if everything would be really simple, if only people would behave themselves.

As a parent, I sympathize (strongly) with the desire to shield kids from profound bio-social deviations. On the other hand, being spitefully offensive to people who are trying to navigate intrinsically messed-up situations seems considerably less than fully civilized.

Intersectionalism and pomo cis-critique are, of course, expressions of leftist vileness. There’s some distance between these cultural attitudes and a cautious tolerance for people in difficult places. (To repeat — if you’re making an enemy of Turing, you’re losing it.)

I’d like to make a point on the topic of sexual deviations similar to the one Spandrell makes in his last post. (also on Anissimov’s bullshit)

As you note, nature can screw up. The important point is to remember that it is a screw-up of nature and something that optimally shouldn’t happen.
If you are born male and are in no way attracted by women and you yourself want to be a woman something obviously went wrong. Transsexualism should be regarded in the same way we regard mental illnesses. If someone is a schizophrenic, you don’t try to accommodate his insanity, you first try to treat it and cure it. Only then, if you are unsuccessful, your only option is to make life as comfortable as possible for this person.
The problem nowadays with transsexualism and other sexual deviations is that there is a massive push to treat them not as illnesses and abnormalities, but as something completely normal. That’s the problem.

If someone is born with a brain tumor, or with autism, or with schizophrenia, initially we never go like “Oh well, he was just born this way!”, we try to take the tumor out, or cure the illness. Yet with sexual deviations, it’s exactly the opposite.
Sure, such deviations might be untreatable, but at the present moment we don’t really know because any research in the area is being blocked by the Cathedral. If there is any indication of research which regards homosexuality and other such deviations as abnormalities and mental illnesses, the Cathedral will rile up a mob and lynch you.
In the past homosexuals and such were condemned by society because people fully realized that those are abnormalities and nature had an accident. But because they didn’t really know how it happens, or whether it’s medically treatable, they performed a type of a “social” treatment of such people, whereby deviants were forced to simply follow the traditional sexual roles against their will. This is something that even the greeks did, as we all know. And our ancestors did it because they knew that heterosexuality is the only functional form of sexuality for a very simple reason: it produces kids.
Point is, Tunney may be nice to talk about, may be a very interesting person with good insights. I have nothing personal against Tunney, or anything like that, he/she looks like an intelligent person whom a lot of neoreactionaries enjoy talking to. But from our standpoint, we should remember that Tunney is suffering from a certain type of an illness, or is just outright lying about his sexuality and gender (even to himself). We don’t know what the problem is with such people, but we know that there is a problem and that this area needs to be researched without progressive censorship.
After all we aim for the truth, and we shouldn’t compromise our main goal in order to be nice and accommodating to someone. That’s what ‘politically correct’ people do. So that’s my view on social conservatism and Tunney.

Now, Anissimov is wrong to think that talking to a transsexual is in some way legitimizing their deviations. That’s retarded. If I talk to a person suffering from a mental illness, does that mean I am legitimizing their insanity and making a statement that schizophrenia or dementia, or manic depression, or something like that is a completely normal and healthy mental state? Obviously not.
And Anissimov knows it. He is not that stupid. Everyone knows his hysteria around Tunney is a load of bullshit. He himself knows his hysteria is a load of bullshit. Tunney has openly denied any attempts to become a “part” of NRx about a dozen times now. But Anissimov is doing it for the status points and signalling and because he wants to turn NRx into his own personal political movement. I guess he is trying to act like a real man and a leader (although as was already established 1000 times, NRx is not a movement, or an organization to have a leader), but being a typical SF nerd, grown up in a progressive environment he ends up sounding like a whiny narcissistic bitch instead.
Anissimov’s narcissism is blatantly obvious from the fact that he wants to turn NRx into a political movement (and a party) and wants himself to be its leader, because learning a few buzzwords like “hierarchy”, “community” and “social cohesion” and shouting about how he is holier than all of us other heretics, who communicate with the spawn of the devil and are not [strike] progressive [/strike] whoops I meant reactionary 😉 enough we should bow to him, accept him as king and build him a palace in Idaho. And he approaches NRx like a bolshevik. Theory and research is overrated, lets start a political movement and make a revolution even though we have no idea what the fuck we are doing (caravans in Idaho, yay!!), I should be the leader, because I am the most ideologically pure, purge anyone who doesn’t follow the “pure doctrine of the Party” (i.e. purge anyone who doesn’t agree with me; Stalin, anyone?) and etc.
Anissimov talks all the time about leadership, yet he has no idea what it is about. As Henry Dampier said some time ago, if people want to follow you, they will follow you.
If you have to tell everyone that you are the leader and they should listen to you, you are no leader and no one will (or even should) listen to you.

Hurlock, you have articulated a very Catholic view of sex and gender abnormalities and I fully concur with your analysis.

To everyone, I had the experience of meeting JT last night among a cadre of usual suspects. The conversation was cordial and convivial. He/she is full of interesting stories and stereotypically feminine in many ways, including liking attention. (JT’s code/OS/ideological geekiness however is about as stereotypically masculine as you can get). I have been consistent in describing JT being having a disorder. I think that is a proper reactionary disposition, even if we might not all agree on the best social, legal, or medical approaches to it.

Anissimov talks all the time about leadership, yet he has no idea what it is about. As Henry Dampier said some time ago, if people want to follow you, they will follow you. If you have to tell everyone that you are the leader and they should listen to you, you are no leader and no one will (or even should) listen to you.

Re: Anissimov. Tho’ I recognize and respect his contributions and influence within the neoreactionary community, and hope to retain him as a friend, I have been forced to conclude over the past few months and especially in view of his excruciatingly poor behavior toward those who happen to chat with JT (and chat with those who so chat and so on), that this analysis of his supposed leadership is substantively correct. I will be posting shortly about this.

C. Reply:May 31st, 2014 at 2:13 pm

Spandrell is mostly correct.

Transsexualism is a problem insofar as it’s being (ab)used for political reasons.

It’s a somewhat rare (1 in 10000) condition that may be caused by the following

– 1) brain incorrectly thinking it’s suppose to have a female body. It seems that the brain structure has slight differences, and a new study has shown that TS people who feel to be in the wrong respond to pheromones in the way of their experienced sex, beginning in early puberty. Hopefully, someone is going to replicate that finding.

– 2) the idea of having a female body being a turn-on. This might or might not be due to sexual fetishism, as straight women apparently are often turned on by their own bodies. Or so it’s claimed. Could be bullshit.

IMO, allowing the odd unfortunate who genuinely has the condition to choose elective surgery doesn’t seem like much of a social ill.

_________________________

Also funny note: not all conservatives are anti-transsexual. Iranian Mullahs are okay with it gender reassignment.

As far as I can tell, the Muslims are a lot smarter wrt institutions than they get credit for. I’m generally hesitant to contradict them, except when my goals are of different types than theirs. (As is the case with polygamy: if you want to create a surplus male population to turn into orcs and use to conquer everything, polygamy is the way to go. But we have no use for it, since we aren’t going to militarize enough to draw the surplus males into the military instead of World of Warcraft, 4chan, or spree shootings; our military draws instead from towns where there’s basically no other avenue open for economic advancement, and also from military families where it’s a tradition. I don’t know how many of those there are anymore, but probably a third of the people I knew in high school were from them.)

It seems like there ought to be a better way of dealing with homosexuals than forcing them to either exit or get surgery. The specifically European (or maybe even American) innovation here is internal exit, or subculture formation; the problem is that you have to buy subcultures off enough that they don’t form political blocs, and that problem seems to reduce to the problem of resisting the tendency of power to centralize over time.

What are the things to be avoided here? Probably the formation of a coalition large enough to push defection–rebellion seemingly for the sake of rebellion, narcissistic politics equating certain directions of difference with power. An analogy: Bismarck introduced social security to buy off potential leftist radicals.

scientism Reply:May 31st, 2014 at 6:08 pm

Transsexualism is the apotheosis of progressivism. A transsexual is to social conservatism as having a tattoo of Marx on your forehead is to libertarianism.

Transsexuals are usually the result of developmental issues. They’re more likely to be leftist, because leftists don’t judge them. I guess.

Social conservatism can go screw itself. Half of it is brain-dead to an absurd degree.

IMO, a proper dark-reactionary society would be something along the lines of ancient Sparta, except with robots and automation instead of slaves.

There’s nothing wrong with raising people in a demanding manner and/or eugenics. Or nudism, especially in a society that wouldn’t tolerate lack of physical fitness.

MW Reply:May 31st, 2014 at 7:34 pm

I’d say the transsexualism issue is more complex than this discussion is allowing for. How does it rank in the hierarchy of social conservative abominations? It’s an attempt to re-order a disordered nature, isn’t it? Even if it’s a solution conservatives don’t naturally warm to, it’s not being driven by an attempt to perversely deepen chaos.

I would say that cross-dressing in public is pretty high on the list of socially conservative abominations. If a person wants to dress-up in women’s clothes at home, well, that’s his/her/zir’s prerogative really, but parading around…C’mon, if you think that’s “fine,” you’re not anywhere on the Right. This goes for disordered natures of all kinds. Keep them in the closet for the good of society.

However, as I’ve said before, tactically JT is great: she can say all kinds of borderline white supremacist stuff and no one is going to go after her because then she can cry discrimination. Using part of the Cathedral to club the other parts.

Persons experiencing gender dysphoria need a diagnostic term that protects their access to care and won’t be used against them in social, occupational, or legal areas… Part of removing stigma is about choosing the right words. Replacing “disorder” with “dysphoria” in the diagnostic label is not only more appropriate and consistent with familiar clinical sexology terminology, it also removes the connotation that the patient is “disordered.”

admin Reply:June 1st, 2014 at 1:03 am

Trouble is, Northanger, we know where that leads — revolutionary counter-normalization and Intersectionalist critique of oppressive Breeders. The line needs to be drawn far nearer to stigmatization than that. Basically, the public norm in any civilized society is strongly conformist, with high pragmatic tolerance for deviations that maintain discretion.

northanger Reply:June 1st, 2014 at 1:20 am

Oppression generates discretion. Btw, I’ve read the murder rate for transsexuals is 1 in 12? (it’s extremely high). Would that be an “Intersectionalist critique of oppressive” cross-dressers?

northanger Reply:June 1st, 2014 at 1:54 am

Btw, “Shenjing Shuairuo” is used in Chinese medicine to offset the stigma of mental illness.

Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology

Origins of Shenjing Shuairuo. Loosely translated as “weakness of nerves,” shenjing shuairuo is often described as a Chinese culture-bound syndrome. However, it has roots in the Western disease construct of neurasthenia, which was introduced into China in the 1920s. The concepts of shen (spirit) and jing (channels that carry vital energy and blood) were combined into a single term, shenjing, meaning “nerve” or “nervous system.” When shenjing becomes shuai (degenerate) and ruo (weak), a variety of symptoms may develop. However, a key feature of the disorder is that these symptoms cannot be traced to an organic cause.

Conceptualizations and Current Status of Shenjing Shuairuo. By 1980, shenjing shuairuo had become the most common disorder in China, diagnosed in nearly 80% of psychiatric outpatients. However, some questioned the diagnostic specificity of the category in light of the country’s recent emergence from the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). During the 1980s, ethnographic and psychodiagnostic studies of shenjing shuairuo led to its conceptualization as both a cultural meaningful diagnostic entity and an idiom of distress operating within local Chinese social worlds. A means of communicating profound experiences of loss and regret, shenjing shuairuo was interpreted as a bodily expression of the social disruptions and moral tragedies that had befallen the society at large.

At the machine-language level, these things are almost entirely ecologically driven—politics/ideology being the tiny foam bubbles on the waves thinking it can somehow regulate that which drives it—the self-regulating underlying tide. Progressivism flourishes/thrives during times of plenty, seeing all of humanity as “the tribe”. Unfortunately ecological “overshoot” can only last so long, the tide must turn—as scarcity makes itself felt the buds of reaction/neoreaction sprout along with all the nasty attributes of the survival instinct, fine tuned to achieve a more stable/lower energy configuration by scaling down “the tribe” into multiple smaller competing tribes.

These things are constrained by the laws of physics and are subject to the laws of thermodynamics—confusion arises when most economists try to conflate the physical with the virtual, the virtual being subject to the laws of mathematics.

There’s nothing inherent in physics, though, that determines resource availability at the level at which your dynamic would hold. In fact resource levels are subject to the requirements of social control, with boom/bust cycles and resource distribution and availability both arising out of the oil-finance cartel which maintain much of that control.

It’s a problem of historical and political fact, not of physics. Given that, you might want to look into the history of alternative energy innovation and what happens to it, and *who* happens to it.

@SaturnIn — Economic systems are open systems embedded in an ecological system. The interactions among these systems—the exchange of energy and matter—are without a doubt, constrained by the laws of physics.

Regarding oil production/supply, currently, global economic data doesn’t seem to support demand constrained models but do support supply constrained models; if China falters—the resource wars sure are hotting up within the 9-dash line, eh?!—oil supply growth is strong or US short term latent demand is sated then the picture will obviously change.

Re: transsexualism. The central biological difference between men and women is (recounting the birds and the bees) that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. This determines their reproductive role and gender roles are clearly derived from reproductive roles (female nurturer, male provider, etc). These roles are supported by neurological differences, but it would be absurd to make neurological differences decisive of gender. Transsexuals claim to feel uncomfortable in their own bodies, etc, but who cares? Who cares if it even has a neurological basis? How is that different from any other biological impediment to masculinity? Should short, weedy men undergo sex change surgery? Should women who aren’t nurturing have sex changes to become men? What’s decisive is reproductive role. Moreover, the mere fact that some women are barren, some men impotent or some people hermaphrodites does nothing to undermine the paradigm. Some people are defective. We already have roles for them: childless aunts and uncles. Some kids get more providers thanks to Nature’s mistakes.

I’d say the same thing about homosexuality. So you’re a man who’s attracted to men? Who cares. Find a decent woman and get married, or don’t and be the odd uncle. What kind of reactionary splits hairs on personal happiness to such a degree that they need to find a way to accommodate this? I remember reading not so long ago that Western homosexual advocacy groups are having problems in China because China doesn’t have a strong taboo against homosexuality to work with (there’s nobody you can yell “homophobe!” at). Instead, Chinese parents react to the homosexual behaviour of their sons by saying, “That’s nice, when are you you going to find a good woman and settle down?” It’s seen as a phase. That seems like a perfectly healthy way for a society to deal with the issue.

So yes, perhaps there’s a disorder here, and we hate disorder, but it’s not a disorder worth caring about on a social level. Some people are depressed, some people are lazy, some people suffer from anxiety. A man wanting to be a woman lies on that continuum and not on the “we need to readjust society to accommodate this development” continuum. The treatment is the same in all cases: “man up.”

More importantly, we need to take a close look at this “man wanting to be a woman” thing. I can believe that some men have certain feminine traits, perhaps genetically ordained, but being “a woman trapped in a man’s body” is a political construct. When somebody says “I have feminine traits” or “I’m attracted to pretty, feminine things” or maybe even “I’d prefer to dress in feminine clothing”, perhaps that’s an expression of a disorder. But when they say “I’m a transsexual”, that’s an expression of Leftist gender politics. Don’t be fooled by the pseudo-medical terminology: the Left has been using that trick for decades. I’d ask: How could this be a real medical disorder (so conceived)? Being a woman is not a feeling women have that they identify introspectively. I’d venture that no woman could describe to you the particular sensation (or compulsion) she experiences that tells her that she is a woman and not a man. They’re women because that’s the role they have in nature and society thanks primarily to their reproductive organs; a psychological or neurological disorder could only make them bad women, not men. So why accept this nonsense from self-professed “transsexuals”? Perhaps they have a disorder, but it’s not the disorder picked out by “transsexual.”

“That’s nice, when are you you going to find a good woman and settle down?” It’s seen as a phase.

I disagree with this. If homosexuals are pushed to conform and reproduce, and if there is a biological basis for homosexuality, those genes will be passed on. Secondly you do not want someone struggling with sexuality/gender issues (and all the psychiatric comorbidities that may follow) to be raising children and heading a household. At best they will be silently closeted forever (unlikely), at worst they will destroy their own families as a result of their own imbalances and repressions. It is no joke that even around the time a “mid-life crisis” comes around, they might destabilize, divorce, and leave their families for a partner. Your best bet is to keep those spheres separate. Permitting separate subcultures to exist(as has historically worked) is a better solution as long as like in China, there is no “homophobia” or overly assertive crackdowns. Indeed, what happened at the Stonewall Inn definitely triggered the LGBT movement. They were alright having queer underground nightlifes until the NYPD decided to violently bust the party one night(this had precedent and was a slow escalation), hence riots, catalyzing what we now call the LGBT movement. And believe me, many who have reaped the benefits of the LGBT-movement are disillusioned and angry about leftist co-optation.

Countless trad societies were able to separately and even contain these marginal groups without an explosion of identity politics. Sometimes this was done through sacralization of these people, as in the case of eunuchs or transgender priestesses that have existed throughout much of human history. I don’t mean sacralization as a stand-in for worshipping them, I mean assigning them a role that has some social or religious function(they were often conceptualized as servants of an ideal or deity).

These are but few options alternative to assimilation(in a way not dissimilar from leftist “we are just like you” politics) and violent policing. I am a transsexual myself, and I will frankly tell you that I cannot raise a family, nor would I want to even be near one (as an odd uncle/aunt), as that will indirectly make my problem everyone else’s. I have seen what happens to trans people who don’t transition, then have families, and eventually lose their minds and it is not pretty. Give us a space to be insane and devious, and our influence over the rest of society will be reduced.

What you suggest is probably right for some people, but I’m skeptical that every person now identifying as homosexual or even transsexual has the same disorder or any kind of disorder. In some cases there might be a genetic factor, in others developmental factors and in still others it might be a purely cultural phenomenon. I’m hesitant to agree with the notion that everyone who is now “out” would have been miserable or prone to deviance under different cultural conditions, or would have passed on defective genes. I suspect it’s a much smaller part of the population that can’t or shouldn’t be assimilated.

It seems possible that some transsexuals are that way for reasons related to a fetish.

However, it’s unclear whether said fetish (being turned on by imagining themselves as female) is another developmental problem, or something learned. Could be both, in different individuals.

argus Reply:June 2nd, 2014 at 6:52 pm

@dreya re:”Countless trad societies were able to separately and even contain these marginal groups without an explosion of identity politics. ”

This is something that’s been on my mind for a while. I think it’s precisely because certain traditional societies pragmatically incorporated inevitable *intra*cultural variation–whether consciously or unconsciously–that they were able to contain the very small groups of innately divergent individuals without the explosion of identity politics. When people are allowed a niche and a productive role within a traditional society, the likelihood of them acting out and creating destructive imbalance is very small, and therefore the system is able to come closer to equilibrium than it would otherwise. This should maintain a relatively stable, *self-organizating* conservative social order.

Taking a laissez faire approach to atypically oriented groups at the public level doesn’t mean sex in the streets and rampant in-your-face degeneracy; in fact I think it would prevent those outcomes and discourage those people from attempting to coopt “normal.” They’re much more likely to understand and accept the necessary primacy of the nuclear family in any balanced society and respond accordingly by settling calmly into a much less visible social role–that means no institutionalized shunning. Progressivism is the only reason LGBTQABCDEFG politics and people are omnipresent in the modern West. Without some toxic agitating catalyst like progressivism, a group that makes up 2-3% of the population would be nearly invisible as a natural state of affairs.

Neoreaction is based on intellectual inquiry, and neoreactionaries are for the most part very much reality based. Doesn’t engaging in top-down social engineering, fresh out of the gate, based on feelz not facts contradict that empirical foundation and the basic assumptions of NRx? I’d say so. I’d also say that setting house rules about who can take part in these discussions about NRx is similarly feelz based.

I’d venture that no woman could describe to you the particular sensation (or compulsion) she experiences that tells her that she is a woman and not a man.

Not having gender dysphoria – that’s one of the little things you don’t notice till it’s gone.

For your information, it seems quite likely that people with gender dysphoria have a brain developmental problem where something went fubar and part of the brain insists they have the wrong genitals and all.

It implies acceptance from the medical community. It’s not a simple case of the good of the individual vs. the good of society (conceived of as a collection of individuals), there are issues of medical legitimacy, political legitimacy, legal legitimacy, cultural acceptance, etc. You could say that it takes a village to make a tranny.

Agreed, it a very small problem relative to major public health concerns. In regard to the crossdresser fetishists, yes they exist, and I have seen them in trans events/meetups (though they are a very small minority). They actually tend to not seek treatment for the most part. If someone wants to chemically castrate themselves and undergo social hell over a fetish, they will realize soon enough that they are mistaken, particularly when their libido drops under hormones and they can’t even feed their fetish. When it does happen, they tend to weed themselves out within a few months, that is, if doctors haven’t already screened and caught them beforehand.

By all means, keep NRx at distance from LGBT politics and reject it in accordance with your values, but it would be hubris to actively prevent people from addressing their health conditions just because they are disturbing.

‘…And we have the problem with Jack.’
‘Couldn’t we just hide him for a couple of days?’
‘No, they’d hear him shouting “Girls!”‘
‘We could train Jack to say something apart from “drink”, “feck” or “girls” like the dog on That’s Life.’

‘Dougal, Father Jack may be bad, but he’s not a dog. [Scratching at door] There he is now. He probably wants to go out. Wait. Maybe we could teach him to say one or two things. Nothing too specific, a few all-purpose sentences. Like “That would be an ecumenical matter.” Yes, any religious question can be answered by that. That’s what I always say. That’s the great thing about Catholicism. It’s so vague, nobody knows what it’s all about. I think it might work, Dougal. I know it’ll work. It WILL work!’